Home on the range

“NO GUMATF, food or drink in the store,” reads the notice on the door of Dave’s Firearms, some miles outside Richmond, Virginia. And an afterthought: “Please, no loaded guns inside.” Dave’s is in a blue-collar suburb, with a dentist’s surgery on one side and a car-parts shop on the other. It is a cosy place, cluttered like an old parlour with camouflage gear, stuffed bobcats, boots, buckets—and guns. Lots of guns. One young man of about 20 stands before a rack of rifles glossy and lean as thoroughbreds. When he is given one to hold, a look of slack-jawed wonder comes over his face; then a flush of pleasure. It is the same fascination that holds his country in thrall.Every ten seconds a gun is made in America; every nine seconds one is imported, adding over 6m guns annually to the estimated 212m already in private circulation, nearly one per citizen. The country’s 1,200 gun-makers, most of them tiny firms, pay $150 for their three-yearly federal permits and are subject to a single initial inspection by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (). Unless the guns they make are fully automatic (in other words, machine-guns), they are subject to virtually no federal restrictions. Manufacturers of ammunition, even of hollow-point rounds, banned under the Geneva Convention for use in warfare, are also virtually unregulated: they pay $10 a year for a manufacturing licence plus 10% federal excise tax.